Sammons Retirement Solutions Enhances Offering
Sammons Retirement Solutions has added new investment options and fund managers to its LiveWell mutual fund IRA series and variable annuity offerings.
Thirty-six new mutual funds have been added to the two LiveWell Mutual Fund IRA Series offerings. A gold fund and a global real estate fund are available on the platform for the first time. Sammons has also broadened the range of socially responsible, balanced equity, international large-cap and high-yield bond funds for the mutual fund lineup.

Eight investment options have been added to the LiveWell Variable Annuity. The additions include two high-yield bond offerings, an emerging markets bond offering and five equity options.

Along with the funds, the firm has introduced four new fund companies—Columbia Management, First Investors, Pax World and Transamerica—to its multimanager IRA platform. Columbia Management and First Investors have also been added to the variable annuity offering.


Orion Integrates Trade Order System
Omaha, Neb.-based Orion Advisor Services has announced the integration of a trade order management system within the Orion Connect app. This system is intended to enable advisors to complete the entire process of building, reviewing and executing trades from Salesforce.com and Redtail customer relationship management platforms.  

The system is designed to save advisors time by allowing them to transmit and receive execution information about equity and ETF trades from account custodians in real time. The trade order management system can also create block orders for accounts, and allocate them, from within the Orion web portal.
“This offering is designed to make the entire trading process more secure and efficient,” says Kyle Hiatt, vice president of business development at Orion.


Millennium Trust And ByAllAccounts Collaborate
Millennium Trust Company and ByAllAccounts, a provider of data aggregation for financial services companies, are working on a new solution for reporting alternative asset values.

The collaboration is intended to bridge the gap between the automated data collection and reporting process for traditional investments and the manual and unstructured process for alternative investments.  

The solution will consist of a platform for the delivery of alternative investment valuations data to the Millennium Trust advisor platform. ByAllAccounts will aggregate, enrich and deliver the data directly into an advisor’s portfolio management system.


NFP Advisor Services Launches Retirement Center
NFP Advisor Services Group’s new Retirement Center is designed to offer support to advisors when they are executing complex retirement benefit strategies for business owners and executives.

The Retirement Center offering includes custom marketing support, discounted fiduciary certification services and access to outside legal resources and executive compensation/benefits experts.


Trusteed IRA Provides Estate Planning Solution
The Private Trust Company (PTC), a subsidiary of LPL Financial Holdings, has launched its new Trusteed IRA solution. It is created in a preapproved trust format and designed to provide a simple, cost-effective way for mass-affluent and high-net-worth investors to direct the manner in which their IRA assets will be distributed to their beneficiaries.

The Trusteed IRA is intended to enable financial advisors to provide IRA holders with greater flexibility in determining how their assets will be distributed after their death. “This is especially useful for stretching out payments to beneficiaries in order to preserve accumulated wealth, for the designation of beneficiaries in complex family situations, and for ensuring that an IRA holder’s wishes are honored,” says Bethany Bryant, president of PTC.


Firm58 Offers Compliance & Surveillance Solution
Firm58, a Chicago-based, independent financial management software company, has a new Compliance & Surveillance Solution for equity and option broker-dealers. The solution actively scans for suspicious activity or red flags that could be traced back to market manipulation and creates daily “exception dashboards.”

Numerous issues are scanned for “order spoofing” and quote-stuffing. Order spoofing occurs when a trader places a large buy order and then quickly cancels it, making it appear that there is high demand for the stock. Quote-stuffing is a tactic of quickly entering and canceling large orders to flood the market with quotes that competitors have to process, inhibiting their high-frequency trading abilities.